Some printing systems use a fixer fluid, which can be used to pretreat a print medium. For example, an ink jet printer forms a printed image by printing a pattern of individual dots at particular locations of an array defined for the printing medium. The locations are conveniently visualized as being small dots in a rectilinear array. The locations are sometimes dot locations, dot positions, or pixels. Thus, the printing operation can be viewed as the filling of a pattern of dot locations with dots of ink.
A fixer fluid is sometimes used to pretreat the print medium, which can address coalescence, bleed, or other similar defects characterized by ink or pigment migration across the printed surface. Pretreatment fluids are often applied as a uniform layer before printing, with common application methods including roll coating, spray coating, and manually applying the pretreatment on the print medium prior to printing an image on the print medium.
Pretreating print media with a fixer fluid can have drawbacks, such as a causing a reduction in gloss of the printed image, as well as increasing the total amount of fluid vehicle that will have to be evaporated prior to ink curing.